By John Leyden for The Register.
This article has been reproduced with permission.
Con-men claiming that the phone at pizza outlets was
malfunctioning persuaded the rep to set in place a call forwarding
request to a number of their choosing. AT&T failed to make any
checks.
As a result, orders for pizzas were fielded by fraudsters, who
predictably insisted advanced payments needed to be made by credit
card. Payment details were subsequently used to make fraudulent
internet purchases under the name of unsuspecting pizza
customers.
The beauty of this simple ruse is the potential marks would have
no reason to be suspicious. After all, they initiated the
orders.
News of the ruse came after an internal memo fell into the hands
of reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle. John
Britton, an AT&T spokesman, confirmed the authenticity of the
memo.
Two incidents of the scam have been reported in southern
California, but it's unclear if the ruse has been replicated
elsewhere. The incidents that AT&T knows about only emerged
after complaints from pizza parlours that their phones had gone
dead.
"If someone doesn't call us, we wouldn't know about it," Britton
told the
San Francisco Chronicle. "After learning of this, we
immediately took action to warn employees to be extra cautious when
dealing with any requests for call forwarding."
Nobody has been arrested over the scam and it's unclear how much
money has been defrauded.
Meanwhile, AT&T is not saying what new security measures it
has instituted to frustrate the con, beyond saying it has warned
other operators and that subsequent attempts to pull off the con
have failed. "We had some guidelines in place that we believe were
effective," Britton said. "Now we have extra precautions."
© The Register 2006
